The students at Mount Hope are learning by heart the hymn “Now Rest beneath Night’s Shadow” (number 880 in Lutheran Service Book). This is a glorious hymn; you can listen to Bach’s choral arrangement of it at this link. Here are a few comments and an anecdote from the book “Paul Gerhardt as a Hymn Writer and his Influence on English Hymnody” by Theodore Brown Hewitt:
Among the common people the hymn became an exceeding favorite and was generally used as an evening prayer. Its childlike simplicity combined with its deep poetical charm has won the hearts of old and young to the present day. Frequently it has been sung on starry nights by men, women, or children in the fields on their homeward way, and many have laid themselves down for the long sleep of death with this hymn on their lips.
A troop of French soldiers entered Lisberg, a small town of Hesse, on the 14th of September, 1796, plundered and killed the inhabitants, and burned the whole town. A little way distant, at the foot of a mountain, was a small cottage in which a mother sat by the bedside of her sick child. Hearing the noise in the town and seeing the burning houses she locked the door and knelt by the bedside and prayed. As the door burst open and a furious soldier rushed in, she spread her hands over the child and cried:
Breit aus die Flügel beide,
O Jesu, meine Freude, . . . (stanza VIII),
[English from LSB 880, stanza 4:
“Lord Jesus, since You love me,
Now spread Your wings above me…”]
and lo! the wild soldier suddenly dropped his arm, stepped to the bed, and laid his rough hand gently on the child’s head. Then going outside he stood guard that none of his troop might harm the cottage.
Here’s the full stanza that’s referenced in the story. It really does make for a beautiful evening prayer:
Lord Jesus, since You love me,
Now spread Your wings above me
And shield me from alarm.
Though Satan would devour me,
Let angel guards sing o’er me:
This child of God shall meet no harm.
In Christ,
Pastor Richard
Painting: “A Village in the Moonlight; The Road at Night” by François Charles Cachoud, 1866-1943
